Summary chapters 8 to 10 Personality Psychology domains of knowledge about human nature
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PSYC305A: PERSONALITY PSYCHOLOGY
CHAPTER 2: PERSONALITY ASSESSMENT, MEASUREMENT AND RESEARCH DESIGN
SOURCES OF PERSONALITY DATA
SELF-REPORT DATA (S-DATA): information a person reveals
- Most common method for measuring personality
- Obtained through: interviews, periodic reports, questionnaires (most common)
- Advantages:
o Individuals have access to lots of information about themselves
E.g. level of anxiety, emotions, feelings, desires, beliefs and private experiences
- Disadvantages:
o Respondents must be willing to and be able to answer the questions
o Respondents not always honest
Especially asked about unconventional experiences/desires/sex practices/traits
o Some people may lack self-knowledge
- UNSTRUCTURED QUESTIONS: open-ended
o E.g. tell me about the parties you like the most
o Twenty statements test blank paper with ) am repeated 20 times
- STRUCTURED QUESTIONS: forced (true-and-false questions)
o E.g. ) like loud and crowded parties – true or false
o Most common include TRAIT-DESCRIPTIVE ADJECTIVES (e.g. active, ambitious, anxious etc)
then asked which term describes them
o Common:
ACL (Adjective Checklist)
Personality scales (rating scales)
NEO Personality Inventory (1-5 Likert scale strong disagree to strongly agree)
CPI (California Psychological Inventory) – read statements and asked if agree/disagree
- EXPERIENCE SAMPLING: people answer some questions everyday for several weeks or longer
o Contact one or more times a day at random interviews to complete measures
o Good for obtaining information about how a person’s trait changes over time
OBSERVER-REPORT DATA (O-DATA): using other people to gather information about a person’s
personality
- Advantages:
o Observes may have access to information not attainable through other sources (e.g.
impressions)
o Multiple observers can be use to assess each individual
INTER-RATER RELIABILITY: allow investigator to evaluate degree of agreement among
observers
Reducing idiosyncratic features and biases of single observers
- SELECTION OF OBSERVERS
1. Use professional personality assessors who don’t know the participant in advance
o Disadvantage: professional observers can’t witness the more PR)VATE actions of a person;
depend on PUBLIC ACTIONS
2. Use individual who actually now the target participants
o Advantage
Observers are in better position to observe the target’s natural behavior
MULTIPLE SOCIAL PERSONALITIES: our manifest personalities change in different social
settings
o Disadvantage: observer may be bias (may overlook negative and emphasize positives)
- NATURALISTIC VERSUS ARTIFICIAL OBSERVATION
, o NATURALISTIC OBSERVATION: observers witness and record events that occur in normal
course of lives of the participants
Able to secure information in realistic context of a person’s everyday life
Can not control events and behavioral samples witnessed
TEST DATA (T-DATA): standardized tests
- Observe to see if people react differently to an identical situation
- Situations are designed to elicit behaviors that serve as indicators of personality variables
- Control the context and eliminate extraneous sources of influence
- E.g. situations where they have to appoint a leader/follower
- Advantage: can set up conditions to reveal key indicators of personality
- Disadvantages:
o Participants may guess measured trait and alter response to create specific impression
o Difficult to verify how the participants and experimenter define the testing situation
obedience to authority misinterpreted as test for intelligence )
o Situations are interpersonal: researcher (friendly vs cold) may influence how participants
behave
1. MECHANICAL RECORDING DEVICES
o actometer to assess differences in activity or energy level (strapped to arms or legs)
o Advantage: Data can be obtained in relatively naturalistic settings
o Disadvantage: no mechanical device for introversion or conscientiousness
2. PHYSIOLOGICAL DATA
o Provide information about level of arousal, reactivity to various stimuli etc.
o Theory about psychopaths: they don’t have normal fear or anxiety response that most people
have eyeblink startle reflex
Startle reflex: blinking of eyes, lowering chin toward chest, inhaling suddenly
Psychopaths didn’t have startle reflex when viewing anxiety-producing photographs
o FUNCTIONAL MAGNETIC RESONANCE IMAGING (FMRI): used to identify areas of brain that
light up when performing certain task as verbal problems/spatial navigation problems
Gauges the amount of oxygen brought to particular places in brain (via blood)
Advantage: difficult for participants to fake responses
Disadvantage: must compare activated state vs resting state
3. PROJECTIVE TECHNIQUES: person given standard stimulus and asked what they see
E.g. inkblots by Hermann Rorschach
Assumes they person projects their concerns, conflicts, traits and ways of seeing or
dealing with the world onto the ambiguous stimulus
LIFE-OUTCOME DATA (L-DATA): information that can be gleaned from the events, activities, and
outcomes in a person’s life that are available to public scrutiny
- E.g. marriages and divorces are public record, speeding tickets, ownership of gun
- Often use S-data and O-data to predict L-data
ISSUES IN PERSONALITY ASSESSMENT
1. Links among various data sources
o Agreed varies depending on particular trait and observability of the trait
Observable traits (extraversion) show higher degree of self-observer agreement than traits
(calculating)
o Advantage (using multiple measures)
Able to average out idiosyncrasies
o Disadvantage (linkage among sources)
, Whether sources are viewed as alternative measures of same construct or as assessment
of different phenomena (e.g. different behavioral samples)
Lack of agreement doesn’t NECESSAR)LY signify measurement error
2. Fallibility of Personality Measurement
o TRIANGULATION: examine results that transcend data sources
EVALUATION OF PERSONALITY MEASURES
RELIABILITY: degree to which an obtained measure represents the true level of trait being measured
1. REPEATED MEASUREMENT: repeated measurement over time
o Two test highly correlated high TEST-RETEST RELIABILITY
2. Examine relationships among the items themselves at single point in time
o Items within a test all correlate INTERNAL CONSISTENCY RELIABILITY
o )nternal because it’s assessed within the test itself
3. Obtain measurements from multiple observers
a. Different observers agree with each other high INTER-RATER RELIABILITY
RESPONSE SETS/NON-CONTENT RESPONDING: tendency of some people to respond to questions on a
basis that is unrelated to the question content
- ACQUIESCENCE: tendency to simple agree with questionnaire items regardless of content
o Counteract by intentionally reverse-scoring some questionnaire items
- EXTREME RESPONDING: tendency to give endpoint responses
- SOCIAL DESIRABILITY: tendency to answer items in way to come across as socially attractive or
likeable
o Want to make good impression, appear well adjusted and good citizens
o Represents distortion and should be eliminated or minimized (most personality psychologists
think this)
o Valid part of other desirable personality traits (e.g. happiness, conscientiousness or
agreeableness) – positive illusions related to better physical health
Self-Deceptive Enhancement subscale: tap self-deceptive overconfidence
o Resolutions
Assume that ere are erroneous or deceptive participants (remove it statistically form other
questionnaire responses)
Develop questionnaires that are less susceptible to this type of responding (select items
found not to correlate with social desirability)
FORCED-CHOICE QUESTIONNAIRE format: confronted with pairs of statements and
asked to indicate which statement is more true of them
Equally socially desirable vs undesirable statements (read book vs see movie)
VALIDITY: extent to which a test measures what it claims to measure
GENERALIZABILITY: degree to which the measure retains its validity across various contexts
RESEARCH DESIGNS IN PERSONALITY
EXPERIMENTAL METHODS: typically used to determine CAUSALITY (fid out whether one variable
INFLUENCES another variable)
- Key requirements of good experimental design
o MANIPULATION of 1 or more variables
o RANDOM ASSIGNMENT: Ensuring that participants in each experimental condition are
equivalent to each other at the beginning of the study
COUNTERBALANCING: participants in both conditions
, E.g. personality theory: extraverts prefer more stimulation and introverts prefer
fewer (noisy and silent conditions, switch both up result: extravert made fewer
errors in noisy condition and more errors in quiet condition and vice versa)
Allow experimenter to rule out ORDER EFFECTS
- MEAN: average
- STANDARD DEVIATION: measure of variability within each condition
- T-test: calculate difference between 2 means
- P-value: see whether difference is large enough to be called significantly different (p < .05)
- STATISTICALLY SIGNIFICANT: different between means would be likely to occur not y chance
- Advantage: good for establishing causal relationships among variables
- Disadvantage: poor at identifying relationships among variables as they occur naturally in everyday
life
CORRELATIONAL STUDIES: statistical procedure used for determining whether there is a relationship
between 2 variables
- CORRELATION COEFFICIENT: for gauging relationships between variables (+1.00=positively related,
0=unrelated, -1.00=negatively related)
- DIRECTIONALITY PROBLEM: if A and B are correlated; don’t know if A is the cause of B or vice versa
- THIRD VARIABLE PROBLEM: 2 variables can be correlated because of a 3 unknown variable
- Advantage: suited for establishing relationships between 2 or more variables that occur in everyday
life
- Disadvantage: poor at establishing causality
CASE STUDIES: examining the life of one person in-depth as case study
- Advantages:
o Find out about personality in great detail (hard in large samples)
o Provide in-depth knowledge of particularly outstanding individuals
o Good for generating hypotheses that can be tested later using correlational/experimental
method
- E.g. an attention-seeking boy
- E.g. serial killer Ted Bundy; so-called serial killer triad (torturing animals while young, starting
destructive fires, bedwetting)
- Disadvantages
o Study on one person can’t be generalized to everyone
WHEN TO USE EXPERIMENTAL, CORRELATIONAL AND STUDY DESIGN
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